Introduction

As a kid, I would only read biographies and autobiographies for class assignments and as a result, I never saw why I would read biographies on my own free time. As I’ve grown up, I’ve gradually read more and more memoirs of people I admire and I find the biography/autobiography genre to indeed be a valuable one that allows readers to gain insights into the lives and journeys of historical figures. Especially as we’re going through current challenging circumstances, it’s helpful to know how these figures got through their own set of challenges in the past and in the present. Most of the time, I’ve borrowed biographies/autobiographies from public libraries because they tend to be pricier to purchase in bookstores. Public libraries have long had the reputation of providing open access to learning and knowledge. The Seattle Public Library is unique compared to its counterparts in that it has created a database of the materials patrons borrow from their libraries both physically and digitally. Among the plethora of memoirs, autobiographies, and biographies written by both celebrities, scholars, and non-celebrities, I was interested in knowing which authors people read most and which medium people prefer to experience autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs.

Summary Information

Curated from the Seattle Public Library database, this dataset of biographies and autobiographies checkouts feature 712, 953 entries borrowed from 2005 to 2023. Possibly due to the release of multiple celebrity memoirs in the past year, 2022 was the year with the highest number of checkouts for biographies and autobiographies. Largely derived from the success of her book, Becoming, Michelle Obama’s autobiographies have been checked out the most in total. Looking back at 2022 however, the author with the most amount of checkouts in 2022 was Michelle Zauner who wrote Crying in H-Mart. Ebooks and audiobooks are the most preferred mediums for reading biographies and autobiographies as the proportion of ebooks is 0.5664904, close to half of the total checkouts for biographies and autobiographies. The second most is the proportion of audiobooks, 0.3340978. Physical books are the least preferred, amounting to only 0.0882541 of total checkouts for biographies and autobiographies.

The Dataset

The Seattle Public Library collected and published the data. Specifically, David Christensen and George Legrady are said to have spearheaded this effort of collecting and publishing SPL’s data. George Legrady initially collected data on SPL checkouts from 2015 to 2017 for an art installation.

This data includes monthly counts of books that have the subject label of “Biography and Autobiography”. The database itself updates every month, but the current dataset used for this project has dates from April 2005 to January 2023. It has 13 columns and 712953 rows. Among these columns are the Checkout Year, Checkout Month, Material Type, Creator, Checkouts, Publisher, Source of Material, ISBN Code, and Subjects according to the Library of Congress.

Based on a report published by the SPL in 2017, this data was compiled from past and present records of checkouts. Past data on physical book checkouts from April 2005 to September 2016 comes from the Legrady artwork data archives. The source of data on checkouts from October 1 2016 to the present is Horizon ILS. For data on digital checkouts, the various vendors supply information about usage and the checkouts through the respective company. The data is completely anonymized, so it does not include information or identifiers of the individual SPL borrowers.

The Seattle Public Library is one of few libraries that has collected and published open data about book checkouts that everyone can access and analyze. Internally, the Seattle Public Library uses this data to decide what books to buy more of.

Because I’m not familiar with all the Creators included in this dataset, there may be some writers who have written biographies and autobiographies whose work is unethical or possibly controversial.

In this dataset, there are multiple spelling inconsistencies when writing the names of Titles or the names of Creators. Because of the variations in labeling these variables, it can create incorrect representations and depictions when analyzing data on Titles and Creators. For instance, Michelle Obama may be considered to only have 30,000 books checked out, but she has an additional 10,000 books registered under the name Obama, Michelle 1964-. There are also additional amounts of books that are unaccounted for. Due to the variety of variations, it’s difficult to filter out each inconsistency by code so there are still a sizable number of variations that remain which I can’t account for through code. In addition, it made it difficult to group the author to the book that they wrote because of the sheer number of variations between Abridged and Unabridged copies. It also prevented me from being able to count the number of books each author has written. Another variable which I was hoping to analyze this data through was the author’s demographics which the dataset does not make available currently. This would be an interesting dimension to analyze library checkouts to see the demographics of authors most read and how it breaks down across categories of race, gender, and age. Another limitation to this current dataset is that there isn’t branch specific data on books borrowed. This inclusion could allow for a geographic analysis of books borrowed and how it ranges across the numerous branches of the Seattle Public Library.

Fal’s Biography Book Picks

For this chart, I created a line chart over time to demonstrate some of the highly rated biographies and autobiographies that I’ve read. I was interested in seeing the overall popularity of the biographies and autobiographies that I’ve read. It seems that Trevor Noah’s autobiography has the highest number of checkouts out of all the authors I included with Maya Angelou having the seocond most. I was surprised to see that the checkouts for Maya Angelou’s books weren’t higher because she has written nearly a dozen autobiographies. Jacqueline Woodson, Haben Girma, and Imani Perry have a consistent rate of checkouts over time.